I think about Deleuze, the movement of becoming (becoming). To extinguish the sound of the stream, I must become the sound; to enter the stream, I become part of it. When I linger in the forest, I take part in the silence and the chirping, the rustling of the leaves. I become one with nature.

That idea of Romanticism - oneness with nature, with a loved one, with the cosmos, with God - generates bliss, delight, bliss, ananda. Deleuze certainly does not use these terms. His philosophy of immanence, of nonduality, attempts to describe the changes of the world, its becoming and disintegration, its construction, its structure, its order, its laws and dynamics through terms such as becoming, deterritorialization, flight, rhizome, repetition, rhythm, etc.. However, his philosophy remains essentially a movement of the concept.

He breaks away from the rigidity of Anglo-American philosophy of language, which focuses on an empirical concept of truth, and instead attempts to describe movements of thought that depict a more complex reality. The central question remains, however, how our thinking, our perception, our experience, our being can be directed towards something outside of ourselves - how our consciousness can draw something into itself, process it, analyze it, observe it and experience it. How can my consciousness become one with what it has as its object? This fundamental problem of almost all Western models of dualism can actually only be resolved through immanence.

When I step into a stream in my imagination and try to switch off the sound, I have to become one with that stream. How do I become one - regardless of whether I actually step into the stream or just imagine it? This is how I experience it in meditation: My consciousness sinks into the depths of existence, understands itself as part of the whole, becomes one with that primordial consciousness, emptiness, Brahman, existence, and sees itself as identical with what it is in its self-awareness.

When I hear a stream rushing, the noise is nothing other than my consciousness itself: the vibration of the water and the vibration of the air, the vibrations and my ear that receives them, my consciousness, which is that primordial resonance, is identical with it, already contains everything in the world within itself. It's a bit like Leibniz's monad; he also had a good thought there, even if he didn't immerse himself in real experience, but remained stuck at the level of the text and truthful statements.

I will (become) thus one with that which is to be extinguished in the koan. By becoming identical at the deepest level of emptiness and recognizing its form, I can give expression to this form. I can now imitate the sound of the stream or imitate its movement, I can bathe in it and flow with it, or I can paint it, perhaps in an ink drawing; I can describe it poetically or try to express it in some other way. But that expression is not identical with being identical - it refers to it.

A koan, then. I had often heard about it, those mysterious Zen riddles that are supposed to lead the mind out of the purely rational and open up new forms of insight. I decided not to read much about it and not to ask others about it. I wanted to get one from a Zen master. During Doksan he asked me a few things about myself. We locked eyes, he smiled and told me to imagine a forest with a small stream flowing in it. When I enter the stream, how do I erase the sound of the babbling? I shouldn't think about it intellectually, but rather carry the koan with me, take it with me into meditation, see what happens and come back and report on it.

The image had an immediate effect on me. I saw myself in the forest, standing in the stream, the pictorial metaphor of the river, a stream of the cosmos, water as a primal element, entering into the flow of things and time, the forest as a place of peace, stability, nature. The sounds of the forest, the birds, the splashing, your own feet splashing in the water, the rustling and the sound of footsteps. Where is my path leading? Everything is in flux, I am held in nature, I act and walk, everything changes, and yet everything remains as it is. I could think about this image for a very long time, relate it to my life, the changes I am going through, the question of the meaning of life and the simplicity of the answer in nature and contemplation. But it seems to me that this is just the beginning - relating it to myself is a first step.

Back to the question: Why should I actually try to switch off the sound? Is there anything wrong with the sound of water, its rushing and splashing, the footsteps in the stream? Who says these sounds are wrong? They don't disturb, they don't distract, they are part of walking. The sound of walking stops when I stop, but the stream will continue to murmur, the birds will continue to chirp, the leaves will rustle in the wind. Is the koan's question perhaps simply that banal? Or does it imply something that can be questioned? Perhaps the assumption that silence is better should be questioned. So why silence? Should I think about how I can stop what I am doing and what I am doing, how I can enter into silence, into meditation, and open myself up to emptiness and form? There is probably already something relevant here.

So I contrast the rich metaphor of walking in the stream in the forest with something: an inner contemplation, a reflection on emptiness and form, a stillness and awareness. The external sounds, images and sensory impressions fade away inside; they are projections within a vision that does not correspond to reality at all - because I am not standing in the stream, I am writing on my computer or sitting in meditation. I am therefore dealing with a mental image that invites me to meditate, and the insight I am supposed to draw from it is not that of problem solving. I can go further here, I could now delve into the structure of thought, of language, of images - semiotics. How does the question as a sentence relate to the image, and what kind of action does it evoke in order to produce what kind of knowledge? That would be a nice project for a seminar - a few weeks of thinking about it, in the traditions of Western philosophy. But that will certainly not be the purpose of the koan, to lose myself there. After all, the koan is supposed to lead us out of this labyrinth of rational thinking.

That was a nice little excursion - the echo of my study of philosophy. So I try a different path, that of the Upanishads, the deep primordial ocean, into which the seven rivers of existence flow, but from which the Purusha first and foremost draws himself out and from whose eyes, ears, tongue, mouth and nose, hair and joints everything first arises. Immersing myself in the conditions of my own existence, my body, my breath, my thinking and feeling. Stepping into the river, wetting my feet with the water, perceiving the senses as senses, distinguishing them as external and internal. And then the task, the question: How can I silence the sound? And why would I want to do that?

Why should I even bother with such a question? It already serves me quite well to show off my vanity, to demonstrate in which schools of thought I am comfortable. Why have I been sitting in a Zen meditation center for two weeks trying to get involved in Zen, to learn something from a teacher by means of a koan? What does he have to show me? Where might the path lead? Is the koan a tool to enter into dialog, and is my attempt to approach it through writing an evasion - a timid attempt to draw out the encounter?

The traditional music of India, the raga, is melodic in relation to a keynote. Occidental music is harmonic, i.e. simultaneous and complex.

In the West, a lot is thought in terms of structures, and for a while there was a lot of talk of structuralist and post-structuralist thinking. Complex systems can be found everywhere: in philosophy, in canonical texts and pictorial systems, in technology and models for explaining the world. An essential basic idea is atomistic thinking. The idea is that the world consists of elementary parts and can be broken down into these in order to be reassembled in a different, more complex or functional way. The living world is dissected in order to understand it. The functioning of these dissected, lifeless parts is understood as a complex, interdependent system in order to explain life.

On the other hand, there is a processual understanding. The world is constantly changing, never standing still, in flux - panta rhei. You can never step into the same river twice. Its counterpart is fire, it is the cause. It draws its energy from the decomposition of organic or the synthesis of inorganic compounds. In doing so, it radiates light. Matter is transformed in fire. It is created in the great fire: e=mc².

Birth and rebirth. Death is the existential human experience par excellence, but at the same time it is not what it appears to be. Like birth, it is a transition, a transformation.

My morning meditation is becoming a bit of a routine, although you can hardly say that after just a handful. It's more of a route, a path or an exploration. Like hiking in the mountains: the summit in view is hiking through the trails, on the ridge, through the valleys and rivers, past the rock faces, through scree and rocks, meadows and forests and beyond the vegetation line on the glaciers in the snow, the mountains become a metaphor for the inner search. Climbing a mountain is a spiritual event. Nevertheless, meditation itself can resemble a hike through the mountains, through the valleys of thought, the rivers of life, the memory images on the rocks, the narrow degrees of the logic of thought, the textures of language. The paths of meditation lead past thoughts and memories. And then suddenly, as if lingering in a clearing, the mind stands still, I realize that I am not wandering at all, but I am in silence and concentration, focused on the here and now, on the point that unlocks infinity, right here, from here all these thoughts and images are actually passing by. I am the connoisseur, the observer, I do not exist, the thoughts do not exist, everything is suddenly there in synchronicity, a great view opens up, a view from the mountain top into the world, down to the valleys and up into the sky between the cosmos and the world.

Within the sublimity of this experience, the sublime, which allows me to experience that the cosmos is structured, composed, in change and transformation, but bound by rules, abstract points of reference become visible: geometry, harmony, composition. I think of mathematical constants or functions, of musical harmonies or color theories, of mineral constructions or biological structures. Flowers that form a point of attraction in their colorfulness, geometry, structure, composition, unfolding and smell.

Where do these constants come from? Are they the building blocks of Brahman, from which the world is derived as a process?

Those constants in the cosmos can be found in art. In more traditional theories of art, the search for these laws is the core of aesthetics, divine inspiration, genius, the sublime or the transcendental. The pre-stabilized harmonies are manifested in architectural principles and can be found in sacred buildings, public buildings or private buildings, depending on the function and orientation of the client. Buckminster Fuller used the hexagon from the bee world as a blueprint for social construction. In sacred art, we often find the golden ratio as a reference for harmony; in social space, we find Fibonacci sequences as a model for organic organization. As someone who has studied Western critical theory for decades, this discovery is a revelation.

In an attempt to free myself from the shackles of enlightenment and critical theory, I wandered into postmodernism and learned: music becomes a landscape of emotions, of the soul, of structure, of time consciousness, of anticipation. The image becomes a surface on which the eyes wander, the senses connect, new connections arise and sensations are constituted. The sculpture becomes a counterpart that refers to something that stands in abstract space and is only a placeholder in real space. The juxtaposition of the sculpture in relation to its surroundings creates a dialog that I can enter into. In these aesthetic experiences, I experience the world as a possible, expanded world, enriched by levels of reality, which suggests a different consciousness, that of the artist or other viewers, and allows for dialog, communication, language. Within art there is a reflection of the cosmos. A creativity is kindled here that creates and produces, expresses what has always been there. Connecting with that which has always been there, immersing oneself in an encounter, enables a deep contemplation of central principles of the cosmos as we can experience it. Reading the firmament is a beautiful image for this.

The natural sciences, the hard sciences, find some constants that capture the beauty of the universe - fractals of ice flowers, for example. Some of these constants seem to be central to the architecture of the universe, as if the universe would collapse if you changed a number after the decimal point at pi. At these points, physicists become spiritual. "God does not play dice," said Einstein.

Yesterday I had a long conversation about the origin of thought. Which comes first, the words or the thoughts. There are of course very different forms of thinking. Visual, musical, analytical, synthetic, performative thinking etc... There is thinking on the level of intuition, there is thinking in memory, there is vision and intuition. There are so many types of thinking. What is thinking? Who thinks while thinking? How is it different from consciousness?

Much within my consciousness is not thinking, it is sensory perception, contemplation, daydreaming, there are unconscious and subconscious processes. Strictly speaking, none of this is thinking. Thinking is reflection, it is a reflection on the world, it is an attempt to understand and comprehend the world. It is largely analytical. When I perceive something through my senses, something is simply given to me within my consciousness. When I think about what I see, I give things names, I identify characteristics, I describe actions. This is my way of understanding the world. Describing the world in the form of an imaginary text allows me to see deeper connections: Functionalities, causalities, principles...

But where does a thought come from? How does it arise? There is intertextual thinking, i.e. I read or listen and react to text with text, connect many texts ... that is rather academic. There is a way of thinking that involves active listening and communication. People who listen to each other and think together explore a thought together. This listening and communicative thinking is exciting. Someone says something, someone else understands something, hopefully the two will coincide as far as possible, because they will never be identical. Now there are many dialogues here that are relatively standardized. Generalities are exchanged, or standard positions are compared, like in a game of chess ... but there is also philosophical dialog, the joint questioning. The question, for example: What is thinking? How do you answer this question? How do you think about it?

Sensations and impressions

I recently read Deleuze's essay on David Hume read. Hume says that everything begins with 'sensation' or 'impression'. When I feel something and then name it, this is the beginning of thinking. I can perceive objects, abstract properties, postulate causality, make statements, establish facts. But how can I record sensations and impressions? How can matter have a memory? How can my consciousness have images? These are Henri Bergson's questions.

What is the relationship between the outside world and the images of consciousness that are then structured into thoughts in language? Doesn't language have to be designed a priori as possible in order to express itself? Chomsky says that our brains, and perhaps also those of animals, have a general capacity for language baked into them. The Bible begins with: In the beginning was the word. Something similar can be found in the Vedas and Upanishads. In the Vedas, however, it is not just language that was there in the beginning, but a whole system of knowledge that encompasses different levels of consciousness and understands the human being as a microcosm. Everything that I can think can also exist and everything that exists can also be thought. We will probably need many more generations as a species. But a correspondence is postulated between the world and consciousness. They are one, nondual.

Deleuze's thinking revolves around how thoughts arise from a level of immanence. How these thoughts connect and combine to form complex systems. He calls this, for example, abstract machines, diagrams, rhizomes, plateaus etc... This is how words, thoughts, things, structures, power, art, the unconscious and the abstract etc. can combine. The world thus expresses itself, there is life in it (A Life). This is also the basic principle of the Upanishads, Brahman expresses itself through the creation of the world. An existence must also contain the process and change. This is the only reason why this reality exists.

As far as we know, man has so far created the most complex and wildest level of reality within thought. If you take all the different languages, cultures, religions, forms of society together, it becomes clear that something is being expressed here, something is manifesting. This is that. This is that.

Origin of thought

The origin of thinking is therefore only on one level in perception. In spiritual practice, inner contemplation and habitual practice (meditation and yoga) are the key to an original way of thinking that frees itself from stimulus-response patterns. The scriptures and teachings, the rituals and exercises serve a self-formation that allows us to look beyond the surface of sensual certainty. The thinking that becomes possible here goes further than the mere recognition of causal connections. It also goes further than rational reflection on problems of ethics, aesthetics and cognition. The rational mind has succeeded in ushering in the Anthropocene, a terraforming that is unique as far as we know. Nevertheless, existential questions remain untouched by this kind of thinking.

So the question of the origin of thought remains. Did the word come first? The word stands for language, which can capture many things. If we understand language as a symbolic system that can also be understood visually, musically or performatively, we could say that thought itself is always language. However, this only covers a small part of our existence. Our consciousness is broader, our physical existence, our life force (prana) our intellect (buddhi), memory (manas), our identity (ahankara) our spirituality (satchitananda), all this goes beyond thinking. Thinking can reflect and describe it, but it is not thinking itself.

I keep asking myself what it looked like at the beginning of thought. Many thousands of years ago ... I remember how we once wanted to bury a cat. Our (living) cat was irritated by the cardboard box. When the box with the carcass was gone, our cat performed a very elaborate ritual. We had never seen this before, even though he is an older cat and we have lived together for a very long time. It was clear that our cat was reacting to the death of a fellow cat. There are many stories from the animal kingdom, the elephant graveyards are perhaps the best known. It seems to me that there is a consciousness here that remembers others.

Thinking is rooted in experience, language, insight. It is often an experience of the world that lies beyond empiricism. This is where everyone's true creativity lies. Thinking is also always an act of creation.

Many of my friends have a strong will, they are creative, they design, make, act, do... They confront the world with their own will and add themselves to it or refuse to accept it as it is. This generates creativity, change. It is the power of Shakti, the creative energy of the universe.

I am different, I observe, I try to understand the world as it is. I don't want to change it, even though I see a lot of suffering and injustice, I observe, I listen... It all seems to me to be a question of perspective. Changing your own position means seeing things differently, I don't have the urge to change the world. A work of art, a cultural configuration, a temple, a birthday party, a planned vacation, a project idea... these are all things that I see, I like to participate, help and get involved. But I don't have this urge to create and I always ask myself why that is. Is there something missing in me? Do I have no driving force within me, no will to create?

It seems to me that my way of creating lies in meditation, it is the way I change my own perception, change my perspective, see the world differently, focus on a different aspect. Is this a form of passivity, of procrastination, or a form of reflection, a power of consciousness, a manifestation of the spirit?

The world needs different perspectives of a consciousness that holds it together, in the truest sense of the word. It is the writers who create worlds. Schriftsteller is a beautiful German word, because its root means that someone uses writing to present, set out or depict, set up and set down, impute, juxtapose something. In the act of writing, a world is created that does not attempt to change the world itself. The presented writing, a text, can change the world if it is read and stimulates action, but the text itself is pure consciousness, the writing merely the medium, it can be translated and transcribed conditionally, set to music, or illustrated... (This paragraph is mistranslated by Google translate)

A contemplative consciousness, in concentration and meditation, is a kind of writing.

Greetings to Kafka

Curry! Every morning there are mildly spiced, wonderful Indian dishes. They are light and complex, there seem to be 1001 spices in them. At lunchtime, Solarkitchen, the community canteen, is simple, vegetarian and good. The principle is healthy food for everyone, everyone can afford it. In the evening, these wonderful dishes again. What they don't serve: Alcohol, meat or fish, sugar. Eggs are a luxury. I used to eat a lot of chocolate in Germany, but now it's far too sweet for me. I treat myself to a complex vitamin B supplement.

The exciting thing is that it changes my whole body. In Ayurvedic medicine, nutrition is a central aspect. I understand that now. This healing process is not a cure for any disease, I am actually quite healthy. But many things are coming to light. Old wounds, for example. My hands have lots of small scars from cuts with kitchen knives. I'm not particularly careful, I live dangerously in the kitchen. These small scars all appear, more every week. My metabolism is changing. It feels great.

Media

In addition to this change (I don't want to call it a diet, because the number of vegetables, spices, proteins and carbohydrates, fruit and quark is so much more varied and nutritious that it is actually more of a feast, a frenzy, a feast), there is a real reduction in media. I don't actually watch movies or videos at all, there is no TV or internet connection in the room. The dining hall isn't suitable for that either. I still follow the news, but not as panicked as I was in Europe. I sleep well.

In the evenings after dinner, I talk to lots of strangers about all sorts of things; we've been playing cards for the last few days. Because everything in Auroville is closed at 8 pm, unless there's a concert, a performance or a movie. Which is often the case.

In addition to my little scars, there is also a sadness, but it feels right. The hectic pace and superfluous consumption of recent decades in Germany, France and the USA may have been fun, but it wasn't just bad for the planet, it wasn't good for me either. Living in luxury is actually sad. I feel that now, and that's good. And here is the healing process. I think that's what we mean by diseases of civilization.

p.s.: The Auroville Bakery is the place of my sin, which is unfortunately irresistible 🙂

What should I take with me to India? I want to live a different life, in a different society, with different ideas and goals. It's warm there, life will be simple. Apart from the basics like a few items of clothing, I'll need my technical devices such as my laptop, cell phone and camera. And what else? A good flashlight, because the country lanes there are not lit. And books... There will also be a number of libraries there. I haven't read for 'pleasure' for a very long time. I read a lot of 19th century novels as an undergraduate: Brontë, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Balzac, Goncharov... In high school it was the ancient dramas of Sophocles or classics like Shakespeare, but also Hesse. I enjoyed reading plays, they were intense, fast-paced and stimulating.

Since I have been using the Internet, and I have been doing so since the beginning of the Netscape browser, my reading has changed. I read less linearly, jump around more, read a lot at the same time. As a result, I sometimes feel dizzy and need books as an anchor. The books that accompany me are always books that are highly condensed in theory. I also read them very slowly, usually only a few pages, then I have a lot to think about again. I don't understand how people devour complex books. Books that interest me represent a whole cosmos of thought. Such a cosmos is difficult to grasp. It's a bit like traveling. Some people want to see everything, to have been everywhere, they collect stories and photos, and yet they haven't really been there. Other countries, cultures and languages take time. You have to approach them slowly, wait for an invitation, be polite and respectful.

Once again, consumerism is probably the guiding principle here. It is linked to capitalist exploitation, which apparently serves self-expression and earns social points. I've always been suspicious of that. Sure, I also like to be entertained and consume media because it's fun, distracting or simply generates great feelings. But this distraction is not sustainable for me. I don't remember movies or books or places etc... I'm interested in how something has changed my thinking. How I have become something else. Encounters with books and places trigger a change, I am a different person after a real encounter, or a different animal, or a different work, depending on who wants to perceive themselves and how...

24 books, an interweaving, an experiment. An artificial juxtaposition. What would a dialog between Deleuze and Aurobindo have looked like? Would they have had anything to say to each other?

Many communities around me are going through a stress test at the moment. The word midlife crisis is often used. I think it's a stupid word because it suggests that life, individual life, is in crisis. This perspective disturbs me. Why should life have a crisis? It seems more likely that communities are being called into question. A breakout, a desire for freedom, self-realization, wanting to catch up. This is another idea that is disturbing. Was the past wrong? That would be a worrying idea. How can the past be wrong?

Rather, perhaps something has changed. This change upsets the familiar, the stable, the status quo. The question is rather this: Why do I want to change and where do I want to go? Is the change I want to allow into my life a good thing? Only from this question does it make sense to cite the concept of crisis. What if the change is good, what if it is bad? Who has the crisis then?

We are constantly growing, growing out and beyond. We should support each other in this. Because this growth causes growing pains. It causes stress at the breaking points. This is where anger and disappointment, fear and insecurity arise.

Bringing about an external change is perhaps more of a skip. In this case, life may have been asleep for a little too long and not noticed the change. Mindfulness is required here. Listen to the growth in order to prevent a crisis.

It was a tour de force. Breaking up the apartment, moving house with friends, putting things in storage, reorienting ourselves before starting a new chapter. Leaving the familiar, breaking the status quo, doing what is important and right without compromising. But that also means suffering and inflicting injuries, breaking things and planting new ones.

It's just strange that some friends feel the same way. The world is a different place after corona. We no longer want to live the way we did before. Disillusioned, midlife crisis, utopian thinking, realizing wishes, experiencing our own mortality, losing certainty. An open and sometimes frightening future, war, climate crisis, dying democracies, new world order.

All these forces come together in Provence. A historic landscape, rich in culture, war and love, beauty and destruction. Starry skies, glittering... that makes you humble. To perceive change not as a threat, but as a necessity. Acceptance.

On the long drive, I had a conversation about speculative thinking. What is it supposed to be? How can we do it and why? I ask more fundamentally: isn't the cosmos the realization of all possibilities? Both in the past and in the future. The whole of time and all possible worlds in one reality. Immanence. Only the power of consciousness flows through this. To become conscious means to create connections, only in this way is speculative thinking possible, only in this way are we free. It is not the atoms that are the nuclei of the universe, but consciousness.